I would wager that, if you get a large ant mill going, the level of pheromone signal would become enormous and be sustained for as long as the mill is going and the ants are alive. So, a sustained, very high level of pheromones might trigger some kind of break-glass response where they invert their logic and seek _low_ levels of pheromone, seek if get _off_ of their track. Or perhaps they begin to erase the pheromone trail (if they can).
Which breaks the ant mill, but now you have to get back to having a functioning colony. Don't know how that would work.
Idea: spend one neuron to track how often the ant thinks it's turning right (left). The input could be differential motion between sets of legs, or an internal accelerometer (if it exists). It takes very little storage to track an exponential moving average (just one persistent variable),
I have seen figure-8 ant mills on YouTube, fwiw. It involved a "going underground" step, eg, go through a tunnel, pop out, turn and walk over the tunnel, turn and go back into the tunnel. I'll see if I can find it again.
following unrewarding pheromone trail for too long could trigger a timeout and walk in the random direction. Then search for a new trail.
Even better if an ant could just return to the last visited anthill on timeout
I'm sure you will get enough problems with the definition of "unrewarding" and time control to make the change a net loss. How stable is the travel speed of ants anyway? Because trails do change form all the time.
As a comic in all seriousness, though, I would imagine any search strategy that avoids a local maximum could be useful, such as other siblings have pointed out.
But I wonder if the ants even have a way of detecting they are trapped in a local maximum. If the signal detection is simply based on the strength of the signal, I don't know how they could detect the trap. If the pheromones of each ant were somewhat different, and if ants have memory -- maybe that's what would be required.
Otherwise if all ants just take random walks deviating from the signal, would you expect them to become isolated, or simply form a more elaborate ant mill whose position changes until the path to the nest is found or they become exhausted?
Wouldn’t be enough to form pheromone trail strong enough to cause other ants to follow.
At best it would just cause ant mills to slowly bleed ants into their surroundings where individuals are at a high risk of predation or simply becoming lost and starving anyway. At worst they follow a random path back into the ant mill.
If it's truly a "death spiral" aren't they all going to die anyway? The off chance that one breaks the loop and finds it back to the colony seems better than just infinitely going in a loop. But I'm no ant entomologist haha
You should watch the videos of these things. They have thousands of individual ants in them, sure having one or two break away and making it back is better than zero. But it’s better in the same way that zero rice falling out of bag is better than one or two grains falling out, zero is definitely better, but nobody bothers to pickup dropped grains of rice.
